Best Indoor Lighting Equipment for Craft Photographers

The most challenging aspect of product photography is getting the lighting right. Lighting affects everything: color, sharpness, shadows, and the overall quality of the image. The outdoors can be fickle and difficult to rely on – clouds, rain, and, oh yeah – that thing called winter.

The best way to control lighting is to create it yourself. Yes, your camera is important, but it’s secondary to lighting and sharpness.

With a good indoor lighting setup, you can photograph whenever you need to – no more waiting for weekends or “a good lighting day” – and deliver consistent results every time. In this special equipment roundup, we’re going to recommend the very best indoor lighting equipment for craft photographers and food bloggers!

We love this little lamp by EGO. It’s easy to set up (just plug it in) and compact enough to sit on a tray or small table along with your product or food. It’s lightweight (less than 3 lbs) and small enough to just tuck away into a closet or drawer. Each Lowel EGO light comes with two 27-Watt custom “daylight” fluorescent lamps behind a white translucent diffusing shield for accurate colors and soft shadows. The lightbulbs also come with a manufacturer’s estimated lifespan of 5,000 to 10,000 hours. That’s a lot of food photos!

At just over $100 it’s not cheap, but it’s the closest thing to natural daylight we’ve seen. Food bloggers Pinch of Yum and Steamy Kitchen both use and recommend this lamp for fantastic food photos on dark winter nights.

Perfect for: photographing babies, portraits, clothing on models or mannequins, jewelry on live models, medium and larger sized crafts on tables and chairs

Transform a corner of your room into a well-lit photo studio with this kit. Sets up in minutes and includes high quality daylight CFL bulbs for consistent color. Aluminum stands are sturdy. This $70 kit looks and acts like a professional $1,000 kit.

This kit is pretty much everything you need in one convenient package, especially if your crafts are too big for a little light tent or worn by human models.

Perfect for: softening shadows on humans and small and medium size objects

Light reflectors are awesome. Hold the disc up near your subject to bounce light back into shadowed areas. (See the magic of bounce lighting in action.)

This “all in one” disc is about the size of a medium pizza. It contains 5 colors: white, silver, gold, black, and translucent. Just unzip to get to the color you want to use, and zip it back up for storage.

Silver is neutral but more reflective than white, so it’s best used in lower light situations (such as shooting indoors).

White, like silver, is also neutral but less reflective. Works best in bright lighting to soften harsh shadows. Since it’s weaker than silver, it’ll have to be held closer to your subject.

Gold reflectors are very warm, use a gold disc to give human subjects a healthy glow or when shooting outdoors to counteract blue tinted daylight shadows.

This LimoStudio kit is Amazon’s best-selling tabletop photo studio kit, and can be found as low as $30 (total steal – my local photography equipment shop wants $80+ for similar kits).

We are big fans of all-in-one photo studio kits for crafters (the kind that come with backgrounds, white walls for diffusing lighting, a mini tripod, and a carrying case). Set up anywhere, take down easily. Perfect for photographing jewelry and other small, detailed things.

Go forth and photograph your handmade crafts! Do you have any specialized lighting equipment? Show it off – share a link to your photos or shop in the comments!

Disclosure: The links in the chart above are Amazon affiliate links and are provided so you can get what you need quickly and easily. If you make a purchase through our links, we get a small commission at no cost to you which helps keep this site free and full of fresh content. As always, we encourage you to shop around for the best deal!

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

[…] My favorite natural lighting setup is bright but cloudy day, but it can be hard to wait around for the right kind of day to land on a weekend so I have a bunch of tricks for working with the lighting I’ve got. If you’re reading this from the North Pole in the dead of winter, check out these great lighting setups that you can use indoors. […]

Footer

Let’s Be Friends

DIYCraftPhotography is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. We always encourage you to shop around for the best deal. You can read our full disclosure here.